The middle of this anthology wasn’t particularly strong, but you can’t go wrong with something that includes Beggars in Spain. Gene Wars, Eyewall, and Desert Rain round out the top stories in the collection, at least according to me. As I’ve noted before, Dozois’ seeming obsession with naming authors as Big Names and Ones to Watch irritates me. While I think who writes a story is important, Dozois spends more ink in his intros on an author’s pedigree than on the story.

Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress

I think this is the first time I’ve read a short story after reading the novel version. Kress set the standard for the trope I call human evolution: what happens when the next version of humans come along. The idea: genetic engineering allows us to create people who don’t need to sleep. The extra time and some beneficial side effects mean they are smarter and more balanced than normal humans. Who promptly start treating them like crap. Re-reading this is tough precisely because I’ve read so many stories that mimic Kress’.

Living Will by Alexander Jablokov

You are going senile. You know it. You want to off yourself before you get too far gone to be a burden. However, you don’t want to do it while you have some semblance of brain left. The dilemma is that once that semblance has left you, you are no longer capable of making the decision. Could you turn that decision over to someone else? Someone you trusted utterly? Good story.

A Just and Lasting Peace by Lois Tilton

Alternate history in which Reconstruction goes on a lot longer, and southern resistance goes on a lot longer. Rather than the north winning and eventually losing, they never really win. Not bad, but it didn’t impress me either.

Skinner’s Room by William Gibson

I don’t really understand why Dozois’ introduction says this story is about housing the homeless. In a future where cities are falling apart, the poor take over the Golden Gate bridge and build structures for themselves to live in. Nothing earth shattering. Pretty good style though, which sets a mood really well.

Prayers on the Wind by Walter Jon Williams

Sometimes it seems like people disaffected by monotheistic Christianity flock toward Eastern religions or philosophies. Although I don’t share Christopher Hitchens vehement language toward those religions, I do tend to agree on principle. If you can’t find evidence for it, it’s not true. Buddhism is one of those religions that falls into that category for me. If you want to believe it on faith, be my guest, but I need evidence. Reincarnation? Asceticism? Bah! Intentionally or unintentionally, this story fits in very much with my view. A future Buddhist-themed galactic empire runs into conflict with an alien race. But right when things come to a head, the empire’s version of the Dalai Lama dies and the new incarnation of Buddha changes things up a bit. To me, highlights how little sense soul reincarnation makes, as well as how despotic religion can be.

Blood Sisters by Greg Egan

When you do a double-blind test of a new drug, isn’t it kind of unfair (if the drug works) that the control group won’t be cured?

The Dark by Karen Joy Fowler

A dark fantasy/horror tale about a boy raised by wolves who ends up as a C.I.A. experiment. It didn’t do a whole lot for me.

Marnie by Ian R. Macleod

If you could go back to high school/college and do it all over again, would you? Here’s how that might happen.

A Tip on a Turtle by Robert Silverberg

What would it be like to actually have premonition? For the guy in this story who predicts who can win turtle races at a resort, it kinda sucks. Well-written, but I’ve seen this done better elsewhere.

Übermensch! by Kim Newman

A sorta alternative history story. It’s not really alternate to real history. Alternate to the Superman history. Instead of the spaceship from Krypton landing in a Kansas field, and Superman working to save the allies, he grows up in Germany and is a tool of the Nazis. Despite not being particularly fond of alternative history, I did like the story. Maybe because superheros from this kind of perspective are done so rarely (that I run across at least).

Dispatches from the Revolution by Pat Cadigan

Not fond of alternative history unless done really well. This one, not so well. What if… the right wing ascended in 1968?! Yeah, it happened in Germany. Perhaps it could have here. But it didn’t. And I’m not sure we really need another scare piece on what the right wing could do in America. I’m pretty sure we don’t need one at all.

Pipes by Robert Reed

An okay story about environmental restoration. Predicated on cheap food from offshore farms making midwest farming unnecessary.

Matter’s End by Gregory Benford

I did not like this story one little bit. A lot of melodrama about India hating scientists so much any scientist/Westerner will get beaten or killed. Westerner comes to secret Indian physics experiment that is measuring proton decay, which will determine the end of the universe. And then things really go to hell. Everything except the actual experiments felt false to me.

A History of the Twentieth Century, with Illustrations by Kim Stanley Robinson

This seems more like a fictionalized travel essay than science fiction or fantasy. A lot more. Maybe I missed something. As travel writing, it seems pretty decent. I want to travel to the Orkney Islands now. As speculative fiction, it seems lacking.

Gene Wars by Paul J. McAuley

I really liked this story about genetic engineering. Not that it’s necessarily likely to happen. The story follows more along the lines of take something to it’s extreme to good effect.

The Gallery of His Dreams by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Interesting concept. Interesting writing. Interesting point. But for some reason I just didn’t get into the story. Mathew Brady, a photographer who sought to chronicle the horrors of war during the U.S. Civil War, went penniless from his efforts. The story has a time traveler whisking Brady to wars throughout time to use his skills and equipment to chronicle wars of all kinds. In the end, people view his work as art, not history. Good story, but perhaps I just wasn’t in the mood.

A Walk in the Sun by Geoffrey A. Landis

Good mundane-SF (at least by my estimation) story about rescuing a person from the surface of the moon. The walk in the sun refers to the fact that the castaway’s life support in her space suit is solar powered. She can’t let sundown catch up to her or her ability to breathe will shut off for 15 days (you try holding your breath that long!). So she has to walk ahead fast enough to stay in the moon’s daylight for a month (at least) until a rescue rocket can reach her from earth. Kind of like the premise of Stephen King’s The Long Walk; walk or die.

Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria by Ian McDonald

A Jew during and before World War II is visited by an angel? I think. I’m not really sure what her visions represent. Another story that didn’t resonate with me, but again probably more me than the story.

Angels in Love by Kathe Koja

A girl overhears her apartment neighbors having loud sex, and she wants some of it. Enough that she starts spying on the woman hoping to get a glimpse of her boyfriend, to see if she can horn in on the action. Nice to see a story about a hard-up undersexed loser being a woman instead of a pasty white geek boy for once. Anyhow, she never sees the man enter or leave the place, despite increasingly stalkerish behavior. What’s going on over there?

Eyewall by Rick Shelley

I loved this story. I have Shelley’s book Fires of Coventry which I really want to read now. Not technically a mundane SF story, but all the key parts of the story are. Basically, a category 5 hurricane leaves 20,000 dead in Florida and a million homeless. A hurricane study group must bow to political pressure. Instead of pure science research, they are supposed to conduct experiments using explosives (including nuclear) to disrupt the eye of a hurricane to get it to dissipate. They don’t like the applied research, and they don’t like using nuclear weapons, and they don’t like that their scientific existence depends on something they don’t like. The non-mundane part is that the experiments occur on a water covered world that has lots of hurricanes and is mostly untouched by human hands. The awesome part is the simmering conflict between the political guys and the original science people. Awesome tension and buildup.

Pogrom by James Patrick Kelly

Another story I liked. Near future story where the young are in conflict with a richer older generation. What I loved is the hypocrisy of the main character, an older woman, commenting on how the younger generation blames the entire older generation for the sins of a few.

The Moat by Greg Egan

Interesting but not compelling (gah! I just used compelling in a review!) idea about people who create their own alternate D.N.A. and why they might want to do so. Hint: it’s an us vs. them thing.

Voices by Jack Dann

Boy talks to the dead. Friend doesn’t believe him. Not inspiring.

FOAM by Brian W. Aldiss

FOAM stands for Free Of All Memory. Unscrupulous people steal other people’s memories to sell, kind of like drugs. Eh.

Jack by Connie Willis

I don’t usually like stories of this type. A type I won’t reveal here so as not to spoil the story, but also partially because the relevant word is never actually used in the pages. But I liked this one. Thought it was a novel take on the idea, and some of the things left unsaid intrigued me. For instance, how down and out would Jack have to be to resort to the kind of subterfuge he does?

La Macchina by Chris Beckett

Yet another version of robots gain awareness. Nothing about this screams best of the year to me, though I wouldn’t call it bad either.

One Perfect Morning, with Jackals by Mike Resnick

I like this story because of what a bastard Koriba Kimante (the elder) is, so beholden to his convictions that he cannot be a father.

Desert Rain by Mark L. Van Name and Pat Murphy

The miracle of artificial intelligence illustrates this story about one woman’s one person bubblehead validation brigade. A BVB is always a little more empty than you’ll think it will be. I’m not sure if this is my favorite story in the book or not. I guess it depends on how I think people relate to their BVBs. Most days, I don’t think most people get that a BVB is skin-deep. Those days I probably will like this story even more.

I kinda do want to know why this particular year is still in print. I bought this new from Amazon. New. It was published over 15 years ago and every other edition of the series older than a year or two has to be purchased used. So why this one?

Title: The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Ninth Annual Collection
Editor: Gardner Dozois
Cover creator: Bob Eggleton (artist)
Series: Year’s Best Science Fiction; 9
Imprint / publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Format: Paperback
Length: 575 p.
Publication date: 1992
ISBN-10: 0-312-07891-9

Not much to say generally. Another pretty good collection of short fiction. Though I do wonder at the preponderance of fantasy stories, particularly given that St. Martin’s was in the 2nd year of their Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series at the time this was published. They did have that niche covered.

Surfacing, Walter Jon Williams

This story takes two S.F. plots and mingles them, and I don’t really like the effect too well. In the first plot, Anthony brings whales to another world because they can help him communicate with a species that lives underwater on that world. Anthony was a scientist who helped decode whale speech. After the discovery that a set of resonances underwater were actually an alien species, Anthony heads to that world to try to decode it, and to figure out what these unseen creatures are. Plot two revolves around a Kyklops, a multi-dimensional alien. This alien has a contract with a woman that allows him to take over her body at will. Anthony falls in love with her, and they plot to release her from the alien’s control. I’ve found other decoding alien languages stories boring, but here I was very interested in it. The damsel-in-distress story? Not so much. The mix? Eh.

Home Front, James Patrick Kelly

Using an apparently unintentional prescient plot device, Kelly explores youth who are eligible to join the military and fight for America. It kind of covers the same ground as Ender’s Game and Lord of the Flies, but in a shorter more digestible chunk. The prescient part is an interchangeable position of Johnny America, the P.R. soldier of the military. Unlike G.I. Joe, Johnny is more of a reality show construction. Except there weren’t reality shows in the 80s when this was written.

The Man Who Loved The Vampire Lady, Brian Stableford

A kind of S.F. take on a fantasy trope, vampires. In this version, vampirism is a blood-born disease sometimes transmitted sexually that allows the vampire to live a long time. Vampires have essentially become the ruling nobility in Europe. Someone finally invents a microscope, and Lady Carmilla (a vampire) assigns her former lover Edmund (a human) to examine the device. He’s a mechanician, which I assume means he’s a tinkerer. He grasps the microscope, and understands the meaning of the little amoeba animals he sees, that they carry the vampirism trait. He knows that the vampires won’t let him live long with the knowledge. Fairly pedestrian idea, but decently well-written.

Peaches For Mad Molly, Stephen Gould

Wow! This was an awesome story. Characterization not so involved. It’s more a concept, and a pretty original one at that, wedded to a thriller mentality. The concept is that when giant skyscrapers are built in the future, a culture of people will live on the outside of them. Think rock climbers in the extreme. The are poor and unable to afford to live inside, or they are malcontents who just don’t fit in there. Our main character decides to go on a trading run down the side of his building, but he has to cross a 10 story area controlled by bandits. He gets past them easily on the way down. But climbing is slower and on the way back up they are ready and waiting for him. Just an awesome story!

The Last Article, Harry Turtledove

Alternate history where the Third Reich wins World War II. In India, the newly dominant Germans take over from the English and inherit their problems with the restless subcontinent. A German officer who is the military governor takes on Mohandas Gandhi. Turtledoves conclusion is that this time Gandhi does not win. The analysis seems to be that nonviolence requires two things to work that would not be present: a very courageous population that would be willing to sacrifice their lives on a large scale, and an opponent that is squeamish about killing people. If the authority has no problem with killing thousands of non-violent protesters, then they will emerge victorious if it scares people into compliance. I think Tian An Men just might have proved Turtledove right.

Stable Strategies For Middle Management, Eileen Gunn

A story about gene manipulation where people can get animal-like bodies. Then it gets surreal by being set in a middle management office and the workers use their changes for advancement. It didn’t really click with me, though it was an interesting juxtaposition.

In Memoriam, Nancy Kress

Would you give up your memory of who you are if that enabled you to live forever?

Kirinyaga, Mike Resnick

I’ve read this story before, but for some reason I always think of the plot of Ivory when I see the title Kirinyaga. Ivory is not as good. Koriba is the mundumugu of the Kikuyu tribe. Originally located in Kenya, they now have their own planet maintained by Maintenance. Kenya is essentially one big metropolis by this time in the future. Maintenance is supposed to have a prime directive like instruction. The Kikuyu get to run it how they want and Maintenance is not supposed to interfere. Only one of the traditions of the Kikuyu is that babies born feet first are demons, and must be killed. Which horrifies Maintenance, as the child of course had no choice in which tradition he would like.

The Girl Who Loved Animals, Bruce McAllister

In the future, many animals are extinct. Some people want to bring them back, using methods like we have heard for dinosaurs. D.N.A. for dinosaurs can be found embedded in amber on occasion. Or mammoths in ice. To my knowledge, we don’t have enough D.N.A. for these animals to clone them yet. And we really don’t have a way to gestate them. Dolly the cloned sheep was gestated by another sheep. But, in the future, we will likely have genetic records for some of the animals that might become extinct. We have live specimens. We can take samples and record everything about their D.N.A. And so if they become extinct, we could recreate them. If we have a way to gestate them. Without artificial uteruses, we’re kind of S.O.L. But, there may be these groups of people trying to revive them. They may have money. And some women may need the money badly enough to take it for these purposes.

The Last Of The Winnebagoes (Hugo award for best novella, Nebula award for best novella), Connie Willis

A nice novella about a future when environmentalism is standard. States have outlawed gas hogs and water is a precious scarcity. Many animals, particularly pets, have become extinct. The protagonist is a photojournalist, one of a dying breed as automation pushes humans out of even that field. On the way to his assignment, he sees a dead jackal in the road. Jackals are rare, though not extinct. But seeing it brings up memories of his dog, over which he obsesses. Still, he dutifully shows up to take pictures of and talk to two older people who live in an R.V., traveling highways and making a living by charging people to see their Winnebago. Human interest story. But he’s too distraught to continue on to his second assignment at the governor’s press conference. Here’s the catch: that makes him look suspicious to the Humane Society which is investigating the death of the jackal. I loved this story.

Love In Vain, Lewis Shiner

This story was included in The Year’s Best Fantasy: Second Annual Collection which I reviewed in July. It’s still a great story, but it doesn’t really seem like S.F. to me. Love this story. Go read it.

The Hob, Judith Moffett

Hobs are gnomelike creatures that live in Britain. Creatures of legend. They feel a need to serve masters, kind of like house-elves in Harry Potter. But as modern life encroaches, the hobs retreat from interacting with humans and hide. Except one of them, Elphi, gets careless and allows a backpacker, Jenny, to see him. It’s a nice story, but it didn’t do a whole lot for me. Very ho-hum. Oh, and the S.F. hook is that hobs are really stranded aliens. And that’s about the length of that hook too.

Our Neural Chernobyl, Bruce Sterling

A really short story that describes a future evolutionary cataclysm from the perspective of an even further future. The neural Chernobyl depicted is a genetically engineered virus that makes people smarter, though most can’t handle it and burn out crazy. But it also jumps to a few animals as well.

House Of Bones, Robert Silverberg

A time-traveler is stranded in the past, among Cro-Magnons. Pushes the idea that our assumptions that Cro-Magnon’s were primitive may not be quite correct. The premise isn’t all that exciting, but it’s a pretty well-written story. I enjoyed it.

Schrödinger’s Kitten, George Alec Effinger

Supposedly illustrating the Schrödinger’s cat phenomena, I just found this story confusing.

Do Ya, Do Ya, Wanna Dance?, Howard Waldrop

Another story that I really wouldn’t classify as science fiction. Maybe I’m just missing something. Frank is still a local in the town where he went to high school. It’s time for the 20 year reunion. Frank becomes a guide to show all the returnees what’s happened to the various places the class used to haunt. The highlight of the reunion is supposed to be a performance by the long since split up high school rock band that briefly achieved stardom right after high school. Only something interesting happens when they play one of their songs. Howard Waldrop stories always seem to have a bit of fun in them. At least the three I’ve read previously. Not deep, but decently good.

The Growth Of The House Of Usher, Brian Stableford

A bit of a homage to Edgar Allen Poe, including the use of language and style of Poe’s period. Here a scientist named Usher lives in a house of biomass in which genetically engineered creatures live. They build the house. They keep it running. Usher wants to pass on his knowledge before he dies, and so invites a colleague to the house.

Glacier, Kim Stanley Robinson

A new ice age has descended on North America. A large glacier is just north of Boston, where the Canadian refugees at the center of the story live. Dad is a professor. Son heads out to the glacier to play by himself a lot. Times are tough. I’m not generally a Kim Stanley Robinson fan, but I liked this story. It shows the effect of climate change on ordinary people. No real explanation of the societal impact of this ice age. You have to glean that from the conversations the kid has with his parents, and some of his interactions with others. So it comes off as a very personal story rather than a birds-eye view.

Sanctuary, James Lawson

This story reminds me a lot of Altered Carbon, except this was written well before. Basically, a computer software designer is found in his office with his mind wiped. And another one working for another company is as well. Cardenas is a cop. His job is to figure out who killed these guys when there is no evidence except the bodies. I’m gonna do something here that I don’t normally do: issue a pretty blatant spoiler. These guys kill themselves. Here’s why I’m spoiling it. They kill themselves because of The Secret. In other words, the law of attraction, which is the stupidest thing ever. The version in this story is that if you repeat something often enough, you set up a harmonic resonance for that action that embeds itself in space-time. Anyone else doing that action latches on to that resonance and can do the action just a bit better than would be expected. So these guys get a super-computer to repeat some program that emulates their brains. And it does it so often that they are literally whisked into the space-time continuum. Urg. Since when did the law of attraction get any traction in anything having to do with science? I’ll buy faster than light travel before this crap.

The Dragon Line, Michael Swanwick

Mordred and Merlin in modern times. I wasn’t so impressed with this.

Mrs. Shummel Exits A Winner, John Kessel

Another story that isn’t really science fiction so much as fantasy. Did Dozois do this in the other anthologies I’ve read and I just not notice? Anyway, it’s not a bad story. Mrs. Schummel is a sad old woman who plays bingo. Lots of bingo. One night at the bingo hall a boy sits next to her. He doesn’t talk. He wins on every bingo card, but never yells bingo! or even waves over the judges. Mrs. Shummel is flabbergasted but doesn’t want him to win over her so she says nothing. He offers her the card, for a price. Will she take it?

Emissary, Stephen Kraus

A researcher finds an alien artifact and turns it on. There isn’t anything groundbreaking in this story, but I thought it was pretty snifty nonetheless.

It Was The Heat, Pat Cadigan

Not science fiction. Not something I liked. The second story in the volume to have appeared in The Year’s Best Fantasy: Second Annual Collection.

Skin Deep, Kristine Kathryn Rusch

On an alien world a young woman is starting to have signs of a mysterious disease. Decent story.

Dying In Hull, D. Alexander Smith (David Alexander Smith)

Man, it must suck to have a common last name like Smith and on top of that use your middle name only to have some famous author come along, use your name, and hog all the top Google spots. Anyway, this is a story of the sea rising and slowly inundating the town of Hull Massachusetts. Like Washington State’s Harry Truman, who refused to leave the side of Mt. St. Helens knowing it would probably be his death, Ethel Cobb continues to live in Hull. There she deals with marauding gangs and memories of people long gone. I think this is the oldest story I’ve read that deals with global warming. I recommend it.

Distances, Kathe Koja

Eh. People are specially altered to received faster than light communications from robotic space ships on their way to Alpha Centauri. This story had no oomph for me. Characters were stock. The ideas were stock.

Famous Monsters, Kim Newman

This was fun! A Martian gets in the movies and after a long career mostly in B-movie roles writes this memoir-like retrospective.

The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter, Lucius Shepard

Wow! Beautiful fantasy novella! Original and powerful. Of course, every Lucius Shepard story I’ve read has been unique. Definitely a fitting end to this anthology.

Title: The year’s best science fiction: sixth annual collection
Editor: Gardner Dozois
Cover artist: Armand Cabrera
Series: year’s best science fiction ; 6
Imprint / publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Format: Paperback
Length: xxiv, 596 p.
Publication date: 1989
ISBN-10: 0-312-03009-6

I apologize for the delay in posting this. I’ve been reading this collection for a couple of weeks and finally finished it on a short cruise this week. However, I wasn’t about to pay the rates that Celebrity wanted to use the internet on their ships, so I waited until I returned to finish the review.

As I’ve written before, I think Gardner Dozois puts out great collections of S.F. This is probably the only anthology series I will ever collect. I only have seven of them, but I poke in the used bookstores in Seattle quite regularly to see if any more ever pop up.

On to the stories:

The Wedding Album, David Marusek

I loved this inventive story. The concept is that current picture albums will be replaced by holograms and simulations of events. Rather than posing for photos, a bride and groom will pose for a holographic simulation. In the story, these are not just reproductions of the event, but the technology endows the holographic entities with their own artificial intelligence. They think for themselves, but start with memories from the originals up to the point where the hologram was taken. The story accomplished two things for me. First, it explores how new technology will change our lives in little ways. Many science fiction stories focus on space travel and vast computer networks and the like. This one highlights just a little small change in how our lives could change. And in a very believable way. John Crowley’s Snow explores a similar way we could record our lives. But that story doesn’t seem to describe what I would think would be a realistic way people would use a technology. This does. The second idea The Wedding Album explores is that of artificial intelligence. It’s not new ground, but the effect is new. It’s written from the A.I.s point of view. Imagine being turned on and off at will by a being that also has the power to reset your memories back to square one. Would you be upset to discover you were re-incarnated but that all record of your previous life were erased from your memory? Doomed to re-enact scenes over and over with severe limitations on your free will. Marusek also gives the first credible take that I’ve seen on having self-awareness without complete free will.

10¹⁶ to 1, James Patrick Kelly

In this story, James Patrick Kelly explores a scenario where a time-traveler set to change the future (by assassinating John F. Kennedy) fails prior to the consummation of his plot, and enlists the aid of a child. Will Ray Beaumont go through with it?

Winemaster, Robert Reed

Julian Winemaster gave up his body for a virtual reality ages ago. His daughter was diagnosed with an incurable disease and opted to give up her body. Winemaster felt like he needed to do the same to support her. I suppose kind of like shaving heads today when a friend undergoes chemo. Only she didn’t really need him there with her, and they drifted apart. Now, the U.S. government has sabotaged a nest housing millions of nanomachines that comprised the minds of the virtual reality people. Government policy makes them illegal except in closely guarded nests, and these nests are barely tolerated. Now, the survivors are on the run. They’ve constructed a body so Winemaster can drive them north to Canada. Yes, even in alternate realities Canada is still more inclusive than the U.S. WInemaster is transporting the survivors north, but he is tailed by a man who appears to be a government agent. He offers to help. Do the virtual minds accept the help or is it a trap to destroy the rest of them? I didn’t find much in the way of a moral or new intriguing ideas to ponder, but the story is good to read on the plot alone. It’s a well constructed mileau, and Reed pays attention to the details.

Galactic North, Alastair Reynolds

Reynolds’ story was just there for me. It didn’t repulse me, but it didn’t really excite me either. The plot follows Irravel and Markarian throughout time as Irravel chases Markarian for betraying a mission during a pirate attack in deep space. She wants to retrieve 200 people kept in deep sleep on Markarian’s ship that the two of them were originally transporting. The pirate enslaved Markarian during the attack, but in the course of the story he seems to disappear. Now, it’s important to realize that this takes place over the course of 10,000 years (or more) as the characters are mostly travelling at relativistic speeds, their lives lengthened by technology and time dilution. Oh, and they are also witness to a technology that destroys worlds in the galaxy, slowly converting all known civilizations to greenhouses of plants. Some things about the story just didn’t work. For instance, Reynolds leaves out key chunks that would explain some of their behavior. Sometimes, it’s good to let actions speak for themselves, and sometimes it needs good exposition of reasons. This is one of the latter situations. The little I can tell about the reasons for the chase, long after these people have no rational animosity, completely baffled be.

Dapple: A Hwarhath Historical Romance, Eleanor Arnason

Dapple is the story of a woman in the Hwarhath society, where women are forbidden to perform certain jobs. One of them being an actor. Helwar Ahl’s (a.k.a. Dapple) family apprentices her to a sailor. After several years as a sailor, she sneaks off the ship to apprentice herself to a lowly acting troupe. Set upon by bandits, she must fend for herself and face her desire to break the prescribed ways, and force those around her to face her desires as well. Fairly typical feminist bent to this story, but thankfully it doesn’t have the anti-male everything would be all right if women just ran things feel. Women more or less run things on Hwarhath. They aren’t supreme, but in the grand scheme they make a few more of the decisions and are just as bound by tradition and stereotype as males are. I didn’t think this was particularly deep, but it was a decent read.

People Came From Earth, Stephen Baxter

Stephen Baxter is one of a new wave of hard SF authors. Hard SF meaning they focus on the science and technology, extrapolating out the ideas based on a concept rather than use the freedom of SF to construct interesting conjectures and explore them. People Came From Earth is set on the moon. After a war between Earth and the Moon for the Moon’s independence, Earth released nanotechnology onto the Moon that destroyed all metal constructions. Basically, they set back the moon to the middle ages. The Moon being metal poor, the current residents are extracting every bit of metal they can to restore their technology base, but are making slow progress and may not be in time to save themselves from losing their atmosphere to lack of gravity or their bodies from poisoning. Earth apparently has no intelligent life.

Green Tea, Richard Wadholm

I gave up on this story about halfway through because it was very confusing. From what I can gather, the main character is offering tea to a gentleman he is about to kill for revenge. He then goes into his monologue, the story of why he’s going to kill the person. This person caused some sort of catastrophe on the ship on which the protagonist worked. Most of the monologue is about the catastrophe, and it involves all sorts of advanced technology all given fancy sounding hard-SF kings of names.

The Dragon of Pripyat, Karl Schroeder

In the future, there’s been a second accident at Chernobyl. Afterward, the entire area is sealed off and a non-profit trust is given the money and power to monitor the site. Except they aren’t given a lot of money. Someone is threatening to bomb or otherwise release the radioactivity inside the sarcophagus. And they demonstrate that they have the power to do so. The trust hires Gennady to investigate. He’s a private investigator, willing to take on a risky proposition in order to make serious money. Later, he’s re-hired to pilot a remote robot to get close enough to disrupt the plot. Only the robot only has a couple of miles radius for it’s remote. He beings the robot in and pilots it, while also setting up a relay so it can be operated from greater distances. But the plotters have other plans and destroy the relay with a missile, leaving Gennady as the only person who can pilot the robot. Really, not that hard of a SF story. The technology is limited and the speculation about the future is pretty reserved. What the story is about is Gennady. He’s shy and wants the money so he can disappear into the net, where he feels most comfortable, where he can be who he wants to be and doesn’t have to face people in person. Through the events at Chernobyl, he has to face himself and the fear inside him.

Written in Blood, Chris Lawson

I didn’t like this story much because there really isn’t much too it. Someone invents a technology that allows viruses to embed messages in unused sections of our DNA, so an enterprising Muslim uses it to embed the Quran in the blood of the faithful. Thus meaning it is heretical to spill their blood. More just a quick sketch than anything else, and it felt to me like it should be developed more.

Hatching the Phoenix, Frederik Pohl

This nice story interspersed the story of a rich woman looking for purpose in her life with the exploration of the Crab Nebula (a project she’s funded). How they do this is by taking a space ship out past the front of the light wave of the supernova that formed the nebula. They set up a giant mirror and watch a planet in that sun’s system, and discover a civilization that is about the be destroyed by the nebula. Since it happened thousands of years prior, all they can be is observers. As the mirror is constructed, the researchers can get better and more detailed pictures of the planet. What they discover there is that the civilization, much like human civilization, wars with itself.

Suicide Coast, M. John Harrison

At first Suicide Coast appears to be a cautionary tale about becoming so integrated with computers that a person loses touch with the real world. The main character is a writer (as best as I can tell) who writes about adrenaline junkies. The second character is a rock climber and adrenaline junkie. It becomes apparent about midway through the story that he’s had an accident at some point as is now paraplegic. He turns to computer games, and slowly becomes unable to separate himself. But then at the end, Harrison turns it all around on the reader. I liked this. Harrison is hard for me to read. I have two of his books that I purchased after reading a laudatory bit from China Mié about Harrison, but I didn’t get very far in them before I put them aside for reading later. I liked what I read, but Harrison’s style is more opaque than some, and it took more work reading it than I cared to do at the time. Now that I’ve got more time on my hands and after liking this story, perhaps I’ll pick them up again.

Hunting Mother, Sage Walker

This little story is about life on a colony ship of some sort. The prospective colonists have brought animals along much like Noah’s Ark. They’ve also genetically engineered some crosses between species, including between humans and animals. Since it’s a long voyage, some of the animals have to be culled, since there aren’t natural predators (with natural contact with prey at least). The story is all about a human/animal person who is in charge of culling animals. He must contemplate culling his own mother as her life is nearing its end.

Mount Olympus, Ben Bova

This is a man against the elements story, where the men and elements are on Mars. Two men on a manned mission to mars fly a specially built craft to the top of Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system. After rappelling down the inside of the crater a few yards, an accident strands one of the explorers inside a lava tube with no power. The other explorer must save him. I kind of liked this, despite only a limited amount of science fiction involved.

Border Guards, Greg Egan

This surreal story takes place in a future where humans live in other dimensions or in computers (I’m not sure which exactly), solving problems of resource scarcity and life expectancy. A lot of the story is about a game of quantum soccer, which I didn’t really understand. Follow the link for more information and a Java applet that lets you play. The story is mostly about Jamil and Margit. Margit is one of the inventors of the space in which everyone lives, but she has seen people die and is traumatized by it. Few people see that anymore. The story felt flat to me. Nice ideas, but no real story and the characters were hard to get into.

Scherzo with Tyrannosaur, Michael Swanwick

Swanwick had an interesting, but largely empty novel about time travel called Bones of the Earth. I liked that novel overall despite a lot of flaws. Scherzo is placed in the same setting as Bones. Basically, at a high society fund-raiser for the time travel project the main event is the viewing of a tyrannosaur through a safe window. While the project takes a lot of effort to protect the timeline from paradoxes, the project leaders break their own rules frequently. One of the table captains asks to be excused, as a woman at the table hitting on him doesn’t know he’s actually her son (from the future). So the project director sends him off and replaces him, to disastrous results.

A Hero of the Empire, Robert Silverberg

I liked this little alternate history of the Roman Empire, where the Roman Empire never fell. It’s divided between east and west in an uncertain coexistence. The protagonist, Corbulo, is exiled to the Arabian peninsula to represent the western emperor. He looks for a way to get back in the emperor’s good graces and locks onto a charismatic Arab named Mahmoud as his ticket. Mahmoud professes a belief in one god, the same god as the Hebrews. Yes, he’s Islam’s Mohamed and he’s beginning his conversion the Arabs to Islam. Only Corbulo sees the danger and sees his way to get back to Rome.

How We Lost The Moon, A True Story By Frank W. Allen, Paul J. McAuley

This moon story is much better than the previous moon story in the collection. Here, a significant mistake releases a small black hole into the moon, triggering massive catastrophic changes on the just beginning to be settled body. So bad that eventually the moon is consumed. A little bit of hard science fiction, and a little bit of first-person story-telling from the character at the heart of the experiment that went awry.

Phallicide, Charles Sheffield

Normally, it seems like Sheffield writes a lot of hard S.F. This one is not really in that sub-genre. Rachel is a bright woman raised in the polygamous community of Bryceville, Utah. Needing money, the Blessed Order sends Rachel off to be educated and work for Tilden, Inc. where, among other things, she is designing a drug to cure the Blessed Order’s senile 90-plus year old patriarch of his impotence. However, her time away from the Order has awakened her to its reality and she’s devising a plan to release her daughter from their clutches. This is complicated though by the strict roles that women play in the Order and by their use of truth serums that she’s developed on herself.

Daddy’s World Walter Jon Williams

This is a cool short story about a child growing up in cyberspace, literally. A university researcher has his son’s brain scanned before he dies and implants the scan in a programmed world on a university computer. The little cyberspace world where the main character Jamie grows up exists entirely in this computer. And so it can be as fantastic as a child would dream. Not that he dreams and programs it (at least not at first), but his father certainly does. Williams pays attention to lots of details, such as a common thing in universities where resources have to be shared, so Jamie only runs part-time, and his sister in real life grows up in real time. So in her brief forays into the imaginary world she ages faster than him. And she shows typical teenage rebellion and tells Jamie that he’s not a real boy anymore.

A Martian Romance, Kim Stanley Robinson

This is a sequel to the story Green Mars, which appears in the third annual collection. I thought that story was good reading for a single read. This one isn’t so much. Now some of the characters from that story as ice-boating on Mars. Terraforming seems to have failed, and all the water on the surface of Mars has pretty much frozen. Didn’t like this at all.

The Sky-Green Blues, Tanith Lee

On an alien world undergoing civil war, a journalist finds out that she is a figment of the imagination of the author she is interviewing. Eh. Wasn’t very compelling to me.

Exchange Rate, Hal Clement

Here, explorers on world halfway across the galaxy encounter an alien intelligence. It’s typical first-contact we-don’t-understand-each-other stuff, but very well executed. A pretty good read.

Everywhere, Geoff Ryman

This one is a big Huh??! to me. Way over my head. Did not get it at all.

Hothouse Flowers, Mike Resnick

What would the quality of life be if we could effectively live forever? Most S.F. stories that deal with immortality assume we also get to stay young and alert as well. But what if you can keep people alive but you can’t reverse aging or senility? In the world of Hothouse Flowers we’ve reached that point, and society also believes the adage that all life is worth keeping. Resnick takes the concept to its absurd ends.

Evermore, Sean Williams

Evermore explores a facet of awareness without true free will. Cyber-people on a probe crossing the galaxy that has an accident and veers off course. Deprived of their original purpose and constrained by their programming, many simply slow themselves down and live in their own little worlds where they don’t have to think much. Their creator, also a presence on the probe, figure out a way to expand their programming so they can learn and grow. Doing so raises the possibility of repairing the probe, but also disturbs the slacker utopia they’ve programmatically built for themselves.

Of Scorned Women and Causal Loops, Robert Grossbach

Grossbach writes an interesting (though I’m sure not completely novel) theory on time travel. The theory is: since moving through space takes time, it should be possible to travel back in time by moving through space. In other words, if a person move far enough away in space, there’s no possibility of getting back to the original spot in time before leaving. Thus, there is not possibility of a time paradox. Now, the discoverer of time travel doesn’t realize this principle, but one of his researchers does. He belittles his researcher when she can’t prove her assertion. But when he expands the time travel field to attempt time travel himself by going back in time a significant amount, he discovers the space component the hard way. Fun story. Of course, scientists that experiment on themselves should always suffer greatly, if you have read any amount of S.F.

Son Observe The Time, Kage Baker

This is a story of The Company, the future enterprise that runs time travel and creates a race of immortal cyborgs who rescue priceless things to make The Company money. So long as they don’t change recorded history, they can do whatever they want. Very blah to me, this story. Basically, a Company operative runs into a renegade operative who implants the idea that the recorded history which is taught them could be faked.

Title: The year’s best science fiction: seventeenth annual collection
Editor: Gardner Dozois
Series: Yhe year’s best science fiction ; 17
Imprint / publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin / St. Martin’s Press
Format: Paperback
Length: liii, 625 p.
Publication date: July 2000
ISBN-10: 0-312-26417-8
LC classification: PS648.S3 Y43

As always, Gardner Dozois picks a great anthology.

The Jaguar Hunter, Lucius Shepard

This is more a tale of fantasy than science fiction. Estaban Caax agrees to hunt and kill a jaguar that terrorizes a section of jungle that a local developer wants to build. Estaban owes the developer money for his wife’s purchases. Only thing is the jaguar protects a gateway between this world and the world of the gods of Esteban’s tribe, a set of gods mostly forgotten. Soon, the gateway will not longer exist. Will Esteban kill the jaguar or will he defect to the other side?

Dogfight, Michael Swanwick and William Gibson

This is a cyberpunk story that illustrates why I’m mostly not a fan of cyberpunk. It’s a great story, about a young punk who gets into a sub-culture of people who dogfight with holographic airplanes. It’s not dissimilar to the culture of barroom pool players (to which this actually makes a reference or two). To advance, Deke tries to fob off a piece of wetware to an unsuspecting young girl, who turns out to be very suspecting and much more competent with wetware than anyone Deke has met. A short romance buds, but the girl has been trained with an aversion to being touched by her family, which wishes her to remain chaste until she’s finished school and got a job. Which is something that not many people do in that milieu. She’s about to get out of her aversion early by using a drug called hype to ace an interview. Only thing is Deke also wants her hit of the drug so he can duke it out with the local dogfight champion. It’s a good story. But it doesn’t need the cyberpunk veneer. Not in the least. Why make a standard story inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t want to wade through 300 made up terms describing some futuristic networked world? Sure, if the story needs it, I have no problem with the device. But this story doesn’t need it in the slightest.

Fermi and Frost, Frederik Pohl

Nice little short story about a nuclear war apocalypse.

Green Days in Brunei, Bruce Sterling

An interesting love story set in a future Luddite kingdom of Brunei, after oil is no longer king and technology has divided most of the world into haves and have -nots. In Brunei, technology is mostly underground, and so an economy built around kampongs, extended households, has grown up. An outside engineer hired to restart the country’s robotic-equipped factory falls in love with the crown princess and has to figure out what to do with his life.

Snow, John Crowley

If something could record your life, but you could only watch the records in random snippets, would that be any different from your own memory? John Crowley writes of just such a technology, where people can have a miniature bug record a few years of their lives as it follows them around. After death, your loved ones could view your life at your mausoleum.

The Fringe, Orson Scott Card

Card wrote a few stories about a post-apocalyptic civilization living in the Utah desert. This one centers around a palsied teacher who turns in a few of the community’s leading citizens for black market profiting. Living on the edge, such smuggling works to the detriment of all. Unfortunately, not everyone appreciates the teacher’s actions, least of all the children of the arrested men. They attempt to take revenge by leaving the teacher without his wheelchair in a wash just before a flash flood.

The Lake Was Full Of Artificial Things, Karen Joy Fowler

A women tries to reconcile her guilt about leaving her lover as he headed off to Viet Nam by undergoing a futuristic memory treatment that brings her memories of the man alive.

Sailing to Byzantium, Robert Silverberg

There are lots of stories out there that explore the meaning of what it is to be human. Famous among this is Isaac Asimov’s Robot series. Even such pop S.F. as the new Battlestar Galactica explores this theme. How can you tell the difference between a construct and real life? Is there any real difference? Silverberg’s Sailing to Byzantium explores it from the perspective of the construct that doesn’t yet know it is a construct.

Solstice, James Patrick Kelly

A man cloned himself as a woman so he can find love, but his clone has emotions of her own. Kinda flat, this one.

Duke Pasquale’s Ring, Avram Davidson

A Dr. Eszterhazy story. I read about ten pages and gave up. Too many characters without introduction for me. If you’ve read other stories in this series it might make more sense.

More Than the Sum of His Parts, Joe Haldeman

In some was this story was enjoyable and in others it wasn’t. The man goes mad due to technology theme is no different that The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells that I read over my Belize vacation. But for some reason the cyborg technology theme did draw me in. One thing that made that effective (where it wasn’t in The Invisible Man) was that you see the transformation from normal to power-mad. In Wells novel, the main character is mad prior to his introduction in the story.

Out Of All Them Bright Stars, Nancy Kress

Loved this little tale of prejudice against aliens. Little blue men come into your café. Kind of freaky looking. Would you want to serve them?

Side Effects, Walter Jon Williams

I’m not really sure this qualifies as science fiction. Doctor makes his money by over-enrolling his low-income patients in pharmaceutical trials and both he and the companies quietly (yet without much coordination) cover up the problems that ensue. The only thing science fiction ish about this is the side effect actually regresses someone in biological age. Dunno Williams’ intent when he wrote this, but given all the issues with drug trials in the last couple of years, this sort of thing could be happening now.

The Only Neat Thing To Do, James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon)

This story reminded me a lot of Robert A. Heinlein’s novels for youth written in the 1950s. Here, a young girl runs off solo to the stars because she wants to be on the cutting edge. She gets to be, meeting up in a first contact with an alien race. Yet, tragically, she is quite unprepared for what happens.

Dinner In Audoghast, Bruce Sterling

I did not get this story at all. Big huh?

Under Siege, George R. R. Martin

This is the story of a time traveller who is attempting to prevent World War 3 by preventing the Russians from taking over Sweden (or Finland, I’m not quite sure) prior to the Russian Revolution. No one is sure what will happen to him and his compatriots in the future should they succeed. He and several other time travellers are freaks bred for the job. And they cannot affect the past physically. Only by mentally nudging participants are they able to do anything, and their powers are feeble at best. Told both from the perspective of the time traveller and the host person he’s trying to influence.

Flying Saucer Rock & Roll, Howard Waldrop

During the 50s, two gangs from Michael Jackson’s Beat It video decide to settle their differences through a sing-off. Mysteriously, one of the boys disappears during strange power outages right at the end. Could it be aliens?

A Spanish Lesson, Lucius Shepard

A slacker hanging out on the Spanish riviera meets up with aliens from another dimension and helps them seal the rift between dimensions through which Adolf Hitler threatens to emerge. Then a bunch of pages where the slacker drags the mental husk of one of the aliens around the world to a Tibetan monastery. No point at all. Awful stuff.

Roadside Rescue, Pat Cadigan

A frustrated motorist waiting for A.A.A. to fix a flat (or the equivalent) is helped by an alien in a limo, only to find out the alien is using him. Nice at it’s length.

Paper Dragons, James P. Blaylock

Another one for the huh? category.

Magazine Section, R. A. Lafferty

A writer of Weekly World News type stories is canned and wonders what he’ll do with his life now and can’t decide which of the many fantastic stories he’s written he’ll retire to.

The War At Home, Lewis Shiner

Very odd story about a man having flashbacks to someone’s Viet Nam war experience. Luckily it was short so I didn’t have to really grok it before it was over. Liked it, but had it gone longer I would have gotten really confused.

Rockabye Baby, S. C. Sykes

Loved this little story, which takes the idea of starting all over again to extremes and does it well. Suppose you get the opportunity to start all over again, but you don’t get to know what you know now? Would you? How about if you’ve had a terrible tragedy that meant you had nothing pleasant left to live for in your current state?

Green Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson

I’ve read at least one of the Mars series, though I can’t remember which book it was I read. I remember not being particularly impressed. Green Mars, isn’t bad though. It’s the longest story in this anthology, but it consists mostly of a fairly non-genre account of mountain climbing. Sure, it’s Olympus Mons on Mars. Except for occasional monologuing by our main character on how he misses the mostly un-terraformed Mars of his 300 years ago youth, you wouldn’t know it wasn’t a normal ripped-from-the-headlines climbing story. Decent reading, once.

Title: The year’s best science fiction: third annual collection
Editor: Gardner Dozois
Series: The Year’s Best Science Fiction book 2
Publisher: Blue Jay Books
Format: Hardcover
Length: 621 p.
Publication date: 1986
ISBN-10: 0-312-94486-1
Subject: Science fiction, America
LC classification: PS648.S3 Y43 1986

I read Kim Stanley Robinson‘s The Years of Rice and Salt last year on my vacation in India. I really didn’t like this book, though I pushed myself to read the whole thing. The premise of this alternate history is that the black plague decimated Europe, leaving it nearly empty. As a result, China and the Muslim kingdoms dominate the world, with some influence from India. It’s really a series of shorter stories set along various times in history tied together by the idea that the characters are re-incarnating into the characters in subsequent stories. These souls are fighting a battle in the afterworld for control or something, and they keep getting sent back. Frankly, that just distracted from the story for me. And the various stories were much too long and many of them just didn’t seem to be too interesting.

I previously read one of Mr. Robinson’s Mars series, and ended up not liking it either. It’ll be a while before I pick up another book of his.

Author: Kim Stanley Robinson
Title: The years of rice and salt
Awards: 2003 Locus Best Science Fiction Novel
Imprint/Publisher: Bantam Books / Random House
Format: Mass market paperback
Publication date: June 2003 (March 2002 in hardcover)
Length: 763 p.
ISBN: 0-553-58007-8
Subject: Black death — Fiction
LC Classification: PS3568.O2893 Y43 2002